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New submitter toygeek writes "In an effort to give various robots more control during free-fall and navigation of severe obstacles, researchers have studied how agama lizards use their tails to retain or correct orientation during leaps and jumps. They've applied the research to both hexapod and wheeled robots, and the results are both astounding, and outstanding!"

Life is a gift and your misery is in your mind only. External circumstances do not matter, only what you think matters. Do you really want to hurt and destroy the love of your life like this? She would be devastated by this. Do you have a mother, father? Other family? What will this do to them? I know, the death of someone close to you is a pain you can never erase, but if that person had killed themselves it would be so much worse because it would be so senseless. You seem like someone who cares a

External circumstances do not matter, only what you think matters. Do you really want to hurt and destroy the love of your life like this? She would be devastated by this. Do you have a mother, father? Other family? What will this do to them?

If external circumstances do not matter, then he is hardly "destroying" love of his life. She will get over it and find someone else in time.

I know, the death of someone close to you is a pain you can never erase, but if that person had killed themselves it would be so much worse because it would be so senseless.

Accidents are senseless, suicide has actual reason.

You seem like someone who cares about others, so why would you do so selfish and cowardly an act as this? And cause all this pain to all those who love you?

Where did that "suicide is cowardly" nonsense came from?

Don't. Get help. You don't have to do this.

It is his life and he has the right to do with it whatever he pleases. Including ending it.

It gets better.

Yeah, and dozen other things get worse. Suicide at least is surefire way to end all past, present and future problems.

I've been at 'the edge', and came back. Shitty way to go out, pretty messy, too. She's gonna have to I.d. whats left of you, why would you do that to her? Pretty goddamn selfish of you, if you ask me. Suicide is a selfish act. What kind of pain are you in?, because lots of other people live with pain every day. You don't love her like you claim you do, or you wouldn't be ideating like you are. Google some sites about suicide, read 'em all, think about how you're gonna explain yourself to God when you

What about the people who have to clean up your body? What about how your wife would feel knowing that you did this.

If you're not a troll, and you're depressed, then things will get better. They always do.If you're in debt, do what rich people do and declare yourself bankrupt.Why you pick the name zizzlezazzledazzle?

You want to kill yourself over $$$? DON'T!!! The day will come when you'll be making money again, just ain't today! Do what you gotta do to keep going, get your ass to a hospital and ask for help. Tell that mate whats going on. Trust me, she's not gonna think you really loved here afterwards, because you left her alone to live her life without you there to help her. Are you getting ehat I'm putting down? THINK about it. God don't want you yet, not that way!

If you aren't in fact a troll, then please stop. Get help. Go to your nearest hospital, tell them your plan, and be honest.

Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.

I have been *this* close to stepping in front of a fast moving train. I went to my psychologist, and I spent a week in a mental hospital. It saved my life. I was on very strong anti-depressants for over 10 years, and am now (prescription and otherwise) drug free. If anyone's ever been completely whacked in the head, and ready to kil

I have thought about it. Often. But probably not come as close as you sound like you are.But bear this in mind: your brain cannot tell when it is coming up with the wrong answers to questions. There is no error-detection / correction. So you need to rely on other people to help solve problems sometimes.Having a "plan" may trick your brain into thinking that it feels better. But you have not solved any problem with this plan; its illusion.

Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. How could you want to hurt the woman you say you love? Please get professional help. Today there are effective treatments for your mental illness.

Your brain may be tricking you. Suicide is absurd. Life is better than death. It is great to exist. If your brain tells you otherwise, most likely it is buggy. Get professional help. Please!

And a suicide is _awful_ for your friends and loved ones. Besides the expected sadness of losing a friend, they will be tormented by thoughts of "would he have decided otherwise if I had been a better friend?"

Besides, suicide can fail, and then you will add physical disability to your existing problems! I could share so

Not only that, a cat uses its tail to turn over in mid-air so that even if you drop it with its feet pointing up it will land feet first as long as it has enough falling time to make the turn. I'm not sure, but I think I've heard of them getting turned in as little as 1.5 feet, but ICBW. Still it would be a great improvement over what they've got so far.

I just watched the related videos, and it is impressive just what an up and down tail can do. But you're right that a tail that can move side-to-side, or that can curl or corkscrew can probably do even more to maintain a desired 3D orientation. No doubt that will be future directions for this work. So, in the real world, it seems like a common situation that you want to maintain the orientation of 90% of the mass of an object, and are willing to sacrifice the 3D orientation of 10% for a short time to do that (until the tail orientation can be reset at no body-orientation cost when the creature is on a surface again). Brilliant. These robot videos really show how amazing nature can be. I really appreciate tails in a way I never had before watching those videos. I especially found of interest video about a predecessor robot to this which includes video footage of the long-tailed lizard used as a prototype:http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/diy/dinosaurlike-tails-make-terrestrial-mobile-robots-more-agile [ieee.org]

That crossed my mind as well -- why study lizards when cats are so adept at landing right side up? If they'd studied cats, they'd know that the stronger the cat's tail, the better an athelete the cat is, so it stands to reason that the better designed the robot's tail, the better the robot will be at its job.

I got the impression it's not supposed to land on its back, so you'd want to tie the buttered bread to the underside (which is easier albeit perhaps less effective than a plate of spaghetti upside-down).

Define practical; it doesn't get much simpler than a weight on a servo. In contrast, how much torque can you get from a small compact flywheel and how much is it going to cost? How quickly can you regeneratively brake it with decent energy recovery?

Reaction wheels (or flywheels) and control-moment gyros work differently, even though they can both be used to create torque,

Reaction wheels spin up (or spin down) the wheel to create torque - the axis of the wheel does not change. The tail in this robot is an unusual case of a reaction wheel - it's not actually a wheel, but is uses the same princple.

CMGs [wikipedia.org] use the gyroscopic effect you get from changing the axis of a spinning wheel to create torque. The rotation speed of the wheel is (usually) constant. They

The next step, which the U. Penn people don't seem to have taken yet, is to solve this as a two-point boundary value problem. Then, instead of trying to maintain attitude during flight, you try to land at a specific time in a specific place with a specific attitude.

Doing that is rocket science. Rocket science is about control of underactuated systems, where the control system has fewer actuators than there are degrees of freedom to be controlled. You want to reach a specified point at a specified time at a specified velocity in a specified attitude. All you have available is the ability to thrust in one direction and to change attitude slowly. But this problem is solveable and there are known solutions. Applying that to robots leads to gymnastics.

The quadrotor people are already doing this kind of thing, but it hasn't been done much for legged machines yet.

I'm not a mechanical engineer, but I am a mathematician with a modicum of experience solving two-point boundary value problems, which are what you are up against when you have an energy budget and have fewer thrusters than degrees of freedom. Angular momentum (and the conservation thereof) is a much better approach, I would think...watch some Olympic gymnasts if you want to see some fine examples of human wetware doing this in real-time.

Since you are dealing with 3D space, you will need *4* points of awareness to keep the center of gravity in balance. You might think that 3 legs and one tail would be best, but then you have to deal with a disbalanced processing problem: triangulation in space, followed by an add-on to balance that. Better to deal with three 2-point axle balancing problems instead. (A:B, C:D, AB:CD).